_1. A Result and a Prologue_
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island,
there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore
the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most
reluctantly by his grieving father.
The patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant;
his face had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged usually
acquire. While his organic processes showed a certain queerness
of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel.
Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry, the voice
was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible, digestion
was incredibly prolonged and minimized. The skin had a morbid chill and
dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly
coarse and loosely-knit. Even a large olive birthmark on his right hip
had disappeared, whilst there had formed on his chest a very peculiar
mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before.
Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no
affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive
of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have
made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and
grotesque forms.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and watched
his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the
thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had
made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his skeptical
colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own
in his connection with the case. He was the last to see the patient
before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state
of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape
became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the
unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer
drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with
Willett the youth was undeniably gone.
He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the
attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was
not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill April
breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-gray dust that almost choked
them. True, the dogs had howled some time before; but that was while
Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and shown
no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the
telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr.
Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both
disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain
closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any
clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for general
credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no
trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.
* * * * *
Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his
taste from the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the
past which filled every corner of his parent's old mansion in Prospect
Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient
things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of Colonial
architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything
else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to
remember in considering his madness. One would have fancied the patient
literally transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of
auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested
in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard
for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were
obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world
which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. His
whole program of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic
wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary
practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to
have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the
schools of our own time. Alienists are of the dominant opinion that the
escaped patient is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting position
till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists.
Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920,
during the boy's last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly
turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and
refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater importance to make.
It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw
a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly dropped his general
antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult
subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely
persistent search for his fore-father's grave.
From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents, basing
his verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and
on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which he made
toward the last.
Those investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so
that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when
he tries to write of them.
The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the
Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip
to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations
chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain _answers_
to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter
penned under agonizing and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of
vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's
memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed
and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many
subsequently noticed.
It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness,
that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward, and
the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to
sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial discovery. There were
the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and
the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought
to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible message
in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained
consciousness after his shocking experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous _results_ which
the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final
investigations; results which virtually proved the authenticity of the
papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those
papers were borne for ever from human knowledge.
* * * * *
One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something
belonging as much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly.
His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous
hill that rises just east of the river, and from the rear windows of
its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered
spires, domes, roofs and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the
purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the
lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick façade his nurse had
first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of
two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on
toward the stately colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose
old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow,
heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their
generous yards and gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower
down on the steep hill, and with all its eastern houses on high
terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for
it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed. One of the
child's first memories is of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and
domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon
from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a
fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious
greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive
silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one
of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.
When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently
dragged nurse and then alone in dreamy meditation. One may picture him
yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with studious eyes
and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a dominant
impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
He would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a walk in the
crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops
to the lower eminence of Stampers Hill with its ghetto and Negro
quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stagecoach used
to start before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious
southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets,
where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled
garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger.
Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first
change, Charles Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace of
the morbid. Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond
their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence or
savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees,
there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical
triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered among his maternal
ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had
come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of
highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.
* * * * *
Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a
certain "Ann Tillinghast, daughter to Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt.
James Tillinghast," of whose paternity the family had preserved no
trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records
in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a
legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of
Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann,
her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground "that her Husband's
name was become a public Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after
his Decease; the which confirming antient common Rumour, tho' not to
be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past
Doubting." This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of
two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one
by a labored revision of the page numbers.
It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a
hitherto unknown great-great-great-grandfather. Having discovered his
own relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he at once
proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might
find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded
beyond his highest expectations, for old letters, diaries and sheaves
of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere
yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought
it worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from
a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial
correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really
crucial thing, though, and what in Dr. Willett's opinion formed the
definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter found in August,
1919, behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It
was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end
was deeper than the pit.
_2. An Antecedent and a Horror_
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what
Ward heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, obscurely
horrible individual. He had fled from Salem to Providence--that
universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting--at the
beginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation
because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical
experiments. He was a colorless-looking man of about thirty, and was
soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter
buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of
Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers Hill west of the Town
Street, in what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this
with a larger one, on the same site, which is still standing.
Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem
to grow much older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in
shipping enterprises, purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped
rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders
of the Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain the
nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five.
As the decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide
notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy
forefathers, and practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear
him out. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable
comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer
gleamings of his windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to
the townsfolk; and they were prone to assign other reasons for his
continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the most part, that
Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do
with his condition. At length, when over fifty years had passed since
the stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years'
apparent change in his face and physique, the people began to whisper
more darkly; and to meet more than halfway that desire for isolation
which he had always shown.
Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude
of other reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and
finally shunned like a plague. His passion for graveyards, in which
he was glimpsed at all hours and under all conditions, was notorious;
though no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually
be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he
generally lived during the summer, and to which he would frequently be
seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only
visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged
Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the
wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture
of Negro blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where
most of the chemical experiments were conducted. Curious porters
and teamers who delivered bottles, bags or boxes at the small rear
door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles,
alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low-shelved room; and prophesied
in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist"--by which they meant
_alchemist_--would not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone.
The nearest neighbors to this farm--the Fenners, a quarter of a mile
away--had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they
insisted came from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries,
they said, and sustained howlings; and they did not like the large
number of livestock which thronged the pastures. Then, too, there was
something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with
only high narrow slits for windows.
Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in
Olney Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man
must have been nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed
one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took
the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there
was less mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen,
the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only
manservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged
French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a door
within which only four persons lived, and the _quality_ of certain
voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable
times, all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give
the place a bad name.
* * * * *
In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed;
for as the newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading
life of the town, he had naturally made acquaintances of the better
sort, whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education to
enjoy.
His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Carwens of Salem
needed no introduction in New England. It developed that Joseph Curwen
had traveled much in very early life, living for a time in England and
making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he
deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman.
There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance,
as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved
among stranger and more potent entities.
In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary and
scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly
overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on the Neck in
what is now the heart of the best residence section where he lived in
considerable style and comfort. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the
best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was
more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been.
Curwen suggested a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he
had never invited anyone before; and the two drove out at once in Mr.
Merritt's coach.
Mr. Merritt maintained that the titles of the books in the special
library of thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which
Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a
lasting loathing. This bizarre collection, besides a host of standard
works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly
all the cabalists, demonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a
treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology.
Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the _Turba Philosophorum_,
Geber's _Liber Investigationis_, and Artephous' _Key of Wisdom_ all
were there; with the cabalistic _Zohar_, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus
Magnus, Raymond Lully's _Ars Magna et Ultima_ in Zetzner's edition,
Roger Bacon's _Thesaurus Chemicus_, Fludd's _Clavis Alchimiae_, and
Trithemius' _De Lapide Philosophico_ crowding them close. Mediaeval
Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned
pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labeled as the
_Qunoon-e-Islam_, he found it was in truth the forbidden _Necronomicon_
of the mad Arab Abdul Al-hazred, of which he had heard such monstrous
things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless
rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the
Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
But the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a
mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward
a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and
interlineations in Curwen's hand.
The book was open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed
such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic
black-letters that the visitor could not resist scanning it through. He
recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his
diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley,
till he saw how greatly it disturbed that urbane rector. It read:
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved,
that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his owne
Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at
his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of
humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy,
call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his
Bodie has been incinerated.
* * * * *
It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street,
however, that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen.
Sailors are superstitious folk; and all made strange furtive signs of
protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure
with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse
in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargos on the
long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen's own clerks
and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel
riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It
was, in a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced,
which inspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which
the old man was held, and in time it became exceedingly difficult for
Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague
horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing
because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist.
Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a
virtual monopoly of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and
cinnamon, and easily led any other one shipping establishment save the
Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt,
rigging, iron, paper and English goods of every kind. Curwen was, in
fact, one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
* * * * *
The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect
yet certainly not less than a full century old, seeking at last to
emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or
analyze, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing.
Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that
there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed
toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors
abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme
care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again
caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumors of uncanny sounds and
maneuvers at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion.
But the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight.
Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact
of his continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough
to warrant; and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be
likely to suffer. So about this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last
desperate expedient to regain his footing in the community. Hitherto
a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an advantageous
marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position
would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also
had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside
the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half
after his death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing
certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and
indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received,
hence looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he
might exert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not
at all easy to discover; since he had very particular requirements in
the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At length his
survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest
ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named
Dutie Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every
conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Captain Tillinghast
was completely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after
a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to
sanction the blasphemous alliance.
* * * * *
Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been
reared as gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted.
Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage
must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no record. Certain
it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the
Crawford packet _Enterprise_, was dutifully broken off, and that her
union with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in
the Baptist church, in the presence of one of the most distinguished
assemblages which the town could boast; the ceremony being performed
by the youngest Samuel Winson. The _Gazette_ mentioned the event very
briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be
cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in
the archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement
the meaningless urbanity of the language:
Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant,
was married to Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Captain Dutie
Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a beautiful
Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity.
The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be
denied; and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by
persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his
threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was
socially the sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the
wall of utter ostracism was somewhat worn down. In his treatment of
his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the community
by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house
in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations,
and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his
wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any
other time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained
in open enmity with him, this being the youthful ship's officer
whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken.
Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and
originally mild disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged
purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband.
On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was
christened by the Reverend John Graves of King's Church, of which both
husband and wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage,
in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and
Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of
the marriage two years before, was stricken from most copies of the
church and town annals where it ought to appear; and Charles Ward
located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the
widow's change of name had apprised him of his own relationship, and
engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness. The
birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence
with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a
duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak
of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that
his great-great-grandmother, Ann Tillinghast Potter, had been an
Episcopalian.
Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome
with a fervor greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen
resolved to sit for a portrait. This he had painted by a very gifted
Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since
famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to
have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney
Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint
of its ultimate disposition.
* * * * *
In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden,
and gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of
suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place
to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. It was after this
transition, which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister
scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which
only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart.
But Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this
change. On the contrary, they tended rather to increase; so that more
and more of his shipping business was handled by the captains whom
he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy
had been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its
profits were constantly decreasing. Every possible moment was spent
at the Pawtuxet farm; though there were rumors now and then of his
presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet
so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered
just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits really was.
Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief
and intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive
persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers
lacked; and subjected Curwen's affairs to a scrutiny such as they had
never had before.
Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal
landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But Weeden,
night after night, following the lighters or small sloops which he saw
steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon
felt assured that it was not merely His Majesty's armed ships which the
sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. The lighters were wont to put
out from the black silent docks, and they would go down the bay some
distance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and
receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size and widely varied
appearance. Curwen's sailors would then deposit this cargo at the usual
point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking it
in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the
Negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which
a large proportion were oblong and heavy, and disturbingly suggestive
of coffins.
Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity, visiting
it each night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by
without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing
snow. Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired
a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during
his absences; and between them the two could have set in motion some
extraordinary rumors. That they did not do so was only because they
knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and make
further progress impossible.
* * * * *
It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a
great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizable
staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife, underlay the
farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth
century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows,
the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north, where the roof
came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other; yet
judging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must
have been accessible through secret passages beneath. These voices
ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of
frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty,
pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in
different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were
frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening.
Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook,
for English, French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used;
but of these nothing has survived. He did, however, say that besides a
few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families
were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand
were historical or scientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote
places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and sullen
figure was questioned in French about the Black Prince's massacre at
Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to
know. Curwen asked the prisoner--if prisoner it were--whether the order
to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar
in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the cathedral, or whether The Dark
Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to
obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means;
for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a
bumping sound.
None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows
were always heavily draped. Later, no more conversations were ever
heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had
transferred his field of action to regions below.
That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many
things. Faint cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from
what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any structure;
whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where the
high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there
was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was
obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill.
* * * * *
It was in January, 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating
vainly on what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering
business, that the incident of the _Fortaleza_ occurred. Exasperated
by the burning of the revenue sloop _Liberty_ at Newport during the
previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an
increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion
His Majesty's armed schooner _Cygnet_, under Captain Charles Leshe,
captured after a short pursuit one early morning the scow _Fortaleza_
of Barcelona, Spain, under Captain Manuel Arruda, bound according to
its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for
contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its
cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to "Sailor
A. B. C.," who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off
Namquit Point, and whose identity Captain Arruda felt himself in honor
bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport, at a loss
what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the
one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand,
compromised on Collector Robinson's recommendation by freeing the
ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters. There were later
rumors of its having been seen in Boston Harbor, though it never openly
entered the Port of Boston.
This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence
and there were not many who doubted the existence of some connection
between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen; it did
not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation
which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in
the town. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of
the significance of the thing; and indulged in the wildest theories
concerning Curwen and his monstrous labors.
The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains;
and the watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen
farm. Large sections were washed away, and a certain number of bones
discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean
chambers or burrows. Something was rumored, however, at the village
of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a
rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked cove. The fisherfolk about
the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as
it shot down to the still water below, or the way that another half
cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of
objects which normally cry out.
That rumor sent Smith--for Weeden was just then at sea--in haste to
the river-bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the
evidences of an extensive cave-in. Smith went to the extent of some
experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success--or perhaps
by fear of possible success. It is interesting to speculate on what the
persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at
the time.
* * * * *
By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell
others of his discoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link
together, and a second eye-witness to refute the possible charge
that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his first
confidant he selected Captain James Mathewson of the _Enterprise_,
who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity,
and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be
heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room
of Sabin's Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate
virtually every statement; and it could be seen that Captain Mathewson
was tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town,
he had had black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it
needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince
him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, and
enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men.
The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West,
whose pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar
and keen thinker; Reverend James Manning, President of the College;
ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical
Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad perceptions; John
Carter, publisher of the _Gazette_; all four of the Brown brothers,
John, Joseph, Nicholas and Moses, who formed the recognized local
magnates; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was considerable, and
who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd purchases; and
Captain Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and
energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed.
The mission of Captain Mathewson prospered beyond his highest
expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants
somewhat skeptical of the possible ghostly side of Weeden's tale, there
was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret
and coördinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential
menace to the welfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at
any cost.
Late in December, 1770, a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of
Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weeden's notes, which
he had given to Captain Mathewson, were carefully read; and he and
Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details. Something very
like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over,
though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Captain
Whipple's bluff and resonant profanity best expressed. They would not
notify the Governor, because a more than legal course seemed necessary.
With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal,
Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town. He must
be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding party of seasoned
privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself. If
he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieked and imaginary
conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined. If
something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned
out to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly,
and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about.
* * * * *
While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the
town an incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little
else was mentioned for miles around. In the middle of a moonlit
January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river
and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads
to every window; and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white
thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front of
the Turk's Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this
subsided as soon as the clamor of the awakened town became audible.
Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what
was happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning,
however, a giant, muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams
of ice around the southern piers of the Great Bridge, where the Long
Dock stretched out beside Abbott's distil-house, and the identity of
this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It
was not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only
in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike
any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged furtive
murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a
resemblance so marvelous as to be almost an identity--and that identity
was with a man who had died full fifty years before.
Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying
of the night before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy
Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. He had a curious expectancy,
and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district
where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very
curious tracks in the snow. The naked giant had been pursued by dogs
and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their
masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming
too near the town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail
traced the footprints back to their source. It was the Pawtuxet farm
of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would have given
much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared
not seem too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden
went at once with his report, performed an autopsy on the strange
corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The
digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in use,
whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely-knit texture impossible to
account for. Impressed by what the old man whispered of this body's
likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson
Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwen's employ, Weeden asked casual
questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of
ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden's Lane and
opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected.
[Illustration: "They found the grave vacant--precisely as they had
expected."]
* * * * *
Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept
Joseph Curwen's mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body
there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the
coöperating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in
the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it,
ran as follows:
I delight that you continue in ye getting at Olde Matters in
your Way, and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's
in Salem-Village. Certainly, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest
Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from what he cou'd gather
onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because
Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my
Speak'g or yr copy'g. Alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall
art to followe Borellus, and owne my Selfe confounded by ye VII.
Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you
Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle up,
for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ----,
and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say
to you againe, doe not call upp Any that you can not put downe; by
the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against
you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of
the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall
commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your know'g
what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his Ebony Boxe, for I was conscious
who must have told you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me
as Jedediah and not Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too
long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son. I am
desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Blacke Man learnt from
Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman wall, and will be
oblig'd for ye Lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.
Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought,
especially for the following passage:
I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only
by yr Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them.
In the Matter spoke of, I require only one more thing; but wish to
be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no Part must
be missing if the finest Effects are to be had, but you can not but
know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and Burthen
to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i. e. St. Peter's, St.
Paul's, St. Mary's, or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all.
But I know what Imperfections were in the one rais'd up October
last, and how many live Specimens you were forced to imploy before
you hit upon the right Mode in the year 1766; so will be guided by
you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and inquire daily
at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.
A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an
unknown alphabet. In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single
oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied; and
authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic
or Abyssinian, although they do not recognize the word. None of these
epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance of
Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward showed that the
Providence men took certain quiet steps.
Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in
the wind; for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look.
His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road,
and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which
he had latterly sought to combat the town's prejudice. The nearest
neighbors to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft
of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that
cryptical stone building with the high excessively narrow windows; an
event which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence.
Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the select group bent
on Curwen's extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some
action was about to be taken. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty
of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every
incident which took place there.
* * * * *
The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things,
as suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action
so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens. According to the
Smith diary a company of about one hundred men met at ten P.M.
on Friday, April twelfth, 1771, in the great room of Thurston's Tavern
at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge.
Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader,
John Brown, there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical
instruments, President Manning without the great periwig (the largest
in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in
a dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Eseh whom he had
initiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest, John
Carter, Captain Mathewson, and Captain Whipple, who was to lead the
actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber,
after which Captain Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the
gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was
with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival
of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the
departure of his coach for the farm.
About ten-thirty a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed
by the sound of a coach in the street outside; and at that hour there
was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed
man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment
later, as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock
Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders fell silently into military
order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or
whaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with
the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were present for
active service Captain Whipple, the leader, Captain Eseh Hopkins, John
Carter, President Manning, Captain Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together
with Moses Brown, who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent
from the preliminary session in the tavern. All these freemen and their
hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifle
apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle
rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road.
An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed,
at the Fenner farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their
intended victim. He had reached his farm more than half an hour before,
and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky. There
were no lights in any visible windows, but this was always the case of
late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the
south, and the party realized that they had indeed come close to the
scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Captain Whipple now ordered his
force to separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar
Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against
possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for
desperate service; a second of twenty men under Captain Eseh Hopkins to
steal down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish
with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank; and
the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves.
Of this last division one third was to be led by Captain Mathewson to
the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to
follow Captain Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining
third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until
summoned by a final emergency signal.
The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a
single whistle-blast, waiting and capturing anything which might issue
from the regions within. At the sound of two whistle blasts it would
advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of
the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept
these respective signals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance
at the first, and at the second descending whatever passage into the
ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare
expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal
of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general
guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown
depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Captain Whipple's
belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute, and he took no
alternative into consideration when making his plans. He had with him
a whistle of great power and shrillness and did not fear any mistaking
or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of
course, was nearly out of the whistle's range; hence, would require a
special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went
with Captain Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was
detailed with Captain Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with
Ezra Weeden, remained in Captain Whipple's party which was to storm the
farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from
Captain Hopkins had joined Captain Whipple to notify him of the river
party's readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast,
and the various advance parties would commence their simultaneous
attack on three points. Shortly before one A.M. the three
divisions left the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another
to seek the river valley and the hillside door, and the third to
subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm.
* * * * *
Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in
his diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the
bay; broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal
whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying
and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later
on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later
Smith himself felt the throb of titanic thunderous words resounding
in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger
with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odor about his clothing appeared
and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never
again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been
Joseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried
a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed; for
though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something
obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart.
It was the same later on when they met other old companions who
had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained
something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or
felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget
it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of
mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single
messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost
sealed their own lips. Very few are the rumors which ever came from any
of them, and Eleazar Smith's diary is the only written record which has
survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of
the Golden Lion under the Stars.
* * * * *
Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some
Fenner correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew
another branch of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners,
from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched
the departing columns of raiders; and had heard very clearly the
angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast
which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a
repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in
another moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a
general invasion, there had come a subdued rattle of musketry followed
by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had
represented in his epistle by the characters "Waaaahrrrrr--R'waaahrrr."
This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing
could convey, and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted
completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and
further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with
a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an
hour afterward all the dogs began to bay frightfully, and there were
vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the
mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Fenner's
father declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal,
though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again,
followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than
those which had preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough
or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its
continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.
Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen
farm ought to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men
were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell
to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human
origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even
gather a few words belched in frenzy: "Almighty, protect thy lamb!"
Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After
that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of
which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's brother, exclaimed that he
saw "a red fog" going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the
distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits
the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive
fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur
of the three cats then within the room.
Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused
with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the
sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by
any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which
any of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of
clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house.
Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be
able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows
rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as
a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it
said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is
the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations:
"DEESMEES--JESHET--BONEDOSEFEDUVEMA--ENITEMOSS." Not till the year 1919
did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal
knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognized what Mirandola
had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among black magic's
incantations.
An unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer
this malign wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown
stench grew complex with an added odor equally intolerable. A wailing
distinctly different from the scream now burst out and was protracted
ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost
articulate, though no auditor could trace any definite words; and
at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and
hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark
madness wrenched from scores of human throats; a yell which came strong
and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which
darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended
to blot out the stars, though no flames appeared, and no buildings were
observed to be gone or injured on the following day.
Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable
odor saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested
a keg of rum for which they paid very well indeed. One of them told
the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the
events of the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the
order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment
and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these furtive letters
of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy,
remain to tell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that
relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept
the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to
add as a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral
traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was
known to his grandfather a queer rumor concerning a charred, distorted
body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was
announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body, so
far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither
thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk
had ever seen or read about.
* * * * *
Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be
induced to say a word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague
data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party.
There is something frightful in the care with which these actual
raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the
matter.
Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were not
produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash
with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered
the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively bandaged
and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party.
Hardest to explain was the nameless odor clinging to all the raiders,
a thing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Captain
Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt, and letters of their
wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding
of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was
aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all strong
men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle
introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill
indeed. President Manning was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew
the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of
those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is
perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelve-month
afterward Captain Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship
_Gaspee_, and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting
out of unwholesome images.
There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden
coffin of curious design, obviously found ready on the spot when
needed, in which she was told her husband's body lay. He had, it was
explained, been killed in a customs battle about which it was not
politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of
Joseph Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith
to construct a theory. This hint was the merest thread--a shaky
underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated letter to
Curwen, partly copied in Ezra Weeden's handwriting. The copy was found
in the possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide
whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue
to the abnormality which had occurred, or whether, as is more probable,
Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself from what he
had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit
cross-questioning. The underlined passage is merely this:
I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe;
by the which I meane, Any that can in turn calle up somewhat
against you, whereby your powerfullest Devices may not be of use.
Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and
shall commande more than you.
In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable
allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity,
Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence
killed Joseph Curwen.
The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from
Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the
raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and
had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance
of the true conditions; but Captain Tillinghast was an astute man,
and soon uncovered enough rumors to whet his horror and cause him to
demand that his daughter and grand-daughter change their name, burn the
library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the
slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He knew Captain Whipple well,
and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone
else ever gained respecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.
From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became
increasingly rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the
town records and files of the _Gazette_. It can be compared in spirit
only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a decade after his
disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runagur
in Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the gods decided must not only cease to
be, but must cease ever to have been.
Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the
house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Power's Lane till
her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living
soul, remained to molder through the years; and seemed to decay with
unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were
standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to shapeless heaps. None
ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which
the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite
image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the
horrors he had wrought.
Only robust old Captain Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter
once in awhile to himself, "Pox on that ----, but he had no business to
laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as though the damn'd ---- had some 'at
up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his ---- house."
_3. A Search and an Evocation_
Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent
from Joseph Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in
everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered at;
for every vague rumor that he had heard of Curwen now became something
vital to himself, in whom flowed Curwen's blood.
In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at
secrecy; he talked freely with his family--though his mother was not
particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen--and with the
officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying
to private families for records thought to be in their possession
he made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat
amused skepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and
letter-writers were regarded.
When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered
the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look
up Curwen's early activities and connections there, which he did
during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which
was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town
of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very
kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen
data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now
Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O. S.)
1662-3; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not
appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech,
dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper.
At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most of
his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and the
strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France,
and Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of
much local inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague
rumors of fires on the hills at night.
Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of
Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem. Hutchinson had a house well
out toward the woods, and it was not altogether liked by sensitive
people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to
entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were
not always of the same color. The knowledge he displayed concerning
long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly
unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic
began, never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also
departed, but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon
Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow visibly old
began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty
years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to
claim his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents
in Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in
Salem till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the
Reverend Thomas Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to
parts unknown.
* * * * *
Certain documents by and about all of these strange matters were
available at the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry
of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles
and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative
nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on
the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on
July sixteenth, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminen under Judge
Hathorne, that "fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete
in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house," and one Amity How
declared at a session of August eighth before Judge Gedney that "Mr.
G. B. (George Burroughs) on that Nighte put the Divell his Marke upon
Bridget S., Jonathan A., _Simon O._, Deliverance W., _Joseph C._,
Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B." Then there was a catalogue of
Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and an
unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none
could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and
began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to
him. After the following August his labors on the cipher became intense
and feverish, and there is reason to believe from his speech and
conduct that he hit upon the key before October or November. He never
stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded.
But of greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took
Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing
he had already considered established from the text of the letter to
Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the
same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly
safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year
sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a
representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to
destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action
in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited
their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other
hands which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and
one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher
recognized from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph
Curwen's.